Sometimes I feel like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. When I was a teenager, admitting to liking computers was social suicide, now fancy computers are created specifically for fashion-conscious women. Going on a BBS was the height of nerdity, now all the cool kids use Facebook. Computers were big beige boxes that cost the price of a used car, now the tiny EEE PC costs a few hundreds.
PCs have become a cheap commodity. They’re not really exciting anymore, you buy one to browse the web and hope you won’t have to buy another one for as long as possible. Price is what matters for most people, not performance.
Buying a 500$ video card doesn’t make much sense when the rest of the computer costs less than that. The enthusiasts who are willing to get an expensive PC to put that card in are also technologically knowledgeable enough to pirate games — and chances are they will if they want to save the money to buy their next PC.
As PCs become an inexpensive commodity, it makes less and less sense to target the most powerful computers on the market. Indeed, casual games are booming while hardcore games have a hard time becoming hits.
PCs will still be good platforms to put games on, but I expect they’ll get fewer high-performance games in the future. The most successful PC games will make creative use of the PC’s unparalleled network access and openness.